Attitude to and Practices for Safe Motherhood Initiatives Among Women of Childbearing Age Attending Health Facilities in Igbo-eze South Lga Of Enugu State.
ABSTRACT
The study investigated the attitude to and practices of Safe Motherhood Initiative (SMI) among women of childbearing age (WCBA) attending health facilities in Igbo-Eze South LGA of Enugu State. Eight specific objectives were formulated with eight corresponding research questions and six null hypotheses were postulated to guide the study.
Literatures relevant to the study were reviewed. Population for the study was 7210 registered WCBA who attended health facilities in Igbo-Eze South LGA of Enugu State. The study adopted a cross sectional survey research design, Multistage sampling procedure was used to select the sample which was 144.
A three section (27 item) researchers designed questionnaire was the instrument used for data collection. Face validity of the questionnaire was established by five experts and split half method of spearman’s Rank difference correlation method was employed to test the reliability of the study.
The instrument was administered to respondents by the researcher by hand. Mean scores, frequencies and percentages were used to answer the research questions while t-test and ANOVA were used to test the hypotheses at .05 level of significance.
Results of the study among others show that there was significant difference in attitude and practices of WCBA towards prenatal as it regards age, level of education and level of monthly income. The study recommended that Health Education programmes should be established and intensified at the grass-root level to increase and promote the utilization of SMI services among childbearing mothers.
INTRODUCTION
Safe motherhood is very crucial for making pregnancy and childbearing safe and enjoyable for the childbearing mothers. Pregnancy and childbirth are natural processes but they are by no means risk-free.
They pose a lot of challenges to human-kind and medical science, both in the developed and developing countries of the world. Globally, a large number of women die due to factors related to pregnancy and child birth.
World Health Organization-WHO (1998) submitted that more than half a million women die each year as a direct result of pregnancy-related complications such as severe bleeding which accounts for 25 per cent; indirect causes 20 per cent; infection 15 per cent; unsafe abortions 13 per cent; eclampsia 12 per cent; obstructed labour 8 per cent; and other direct causes 8 per cent.
The above report further indicated that at least another 20 million mothers suffer serious and long-lasting illnesses or disabilities.
Ara and Islam (2013) observed that worldwide, about one woman dies in every single minute of the day and that for each woman who dies, an estimated 100 women survive childbearing but suffer from serious disease, disability, or physical damage caused by pregnancy-related complications. These statistics are startling.
It appears this is also the case with infant deaths and morbidity. The number of deaths and morbidities of newborn babies globally is still high.
WHO (2012) noted that every year, 4 million newborn infants die and millions more are disabled because of poorly managed pregnancies and deliveries? Requejo (2013) indicated that 43 per cent of child deaths occur during the first month of life.
In 2011 alone, 6.9 million children under the age of five died (United Nations Children Fund-UNICEF, 2012). The trend of maternal and child mortality and morbidity appears to be worse in the developing countries.
Reports show that there is high rate of maternal mortality and morbidity due to pregnancy and child birth in developing countries compared to their developed counterparts.
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StudentsandScholarship Team.
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